By Hank Kirton
Photo By Toby Huss
We’re eighteen years old and bored. It’s a week before Christmas. Abram and I decide there’s nothing better to do, so we force my dying AMC Hornet through the freezing night to score some acid. We need an event in our lives. Abram has a hippie-buddy who deals psychedelics.
Expand →
By Kim Dallesandro
Photo By Max Reeves
“She liked to trace the varicose veins on her legs with her fingers while she stared out the window in the late afternoon. They were like mazes, or intricate spider webs; she tried to find a beginning point and an end making it a game but never succeeding in finding a clear path to the end and it always surprised her…
Expand →
By Díre McCain
I was born rootless and restless, the youngest child of six, three of each kind. I materialized in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, and on the eighth day, found myself in Memphis, Tennessee. The first phase of my life was spent in excruciating discomfort. Midway through the gestation period, my pill-popping mother…
Expand →
By Matt Leyshon
Photos By Patricia Routh
The summer afternoon trembled to the buzz of chainsaws as workmen tidied the trees around the allotments. Magpies chattered angrily, hopping back and forth on the bushes. Paul took his bag from his shoulder for a moment and looked across the road to his mother’s house and the estate beyond.
Expand →
By Declan Tan
There is a constant and infinite realisation of this over and over and over: What it means to be in such a position. Trapped. All of us. Unable to break free for reasons created by outsiders. But it seems a sentiment lost forgotten erased only for some to begin the Clutching. Horrific tones that deny, and viscous inks…
Expand →
By Tommy Shannon
It is 1973 and I’m 7 years old, my parents won’t let us children watch television, and even if we could, the Watergate hearings have preempted all of the regular programming. We live in Washington D.C. for the summer, and this is the media story against which all others are measured.
Expand →
By David Gionfriddo
Providence, R.I., November 6, 2063: Cold drizzle from the autumn sky hung all around the restive swarm of mourners outside the Mortech Necroplex Parkside East. It collected in the folds of plasticene mourning cloaks, glued medieval tunics to the bodies of tattooed tribalists huddled in office doorways…
Expand →
By Kim Dallesandro
I always wear Frank’s old flannel shirt when I go out after dark. Frank being my biological father, the asshole, the bank robber, the one that made mom spit on the ground every time she said his name, that Frank. The shirt is old and worn, with a broken top button and a blood stain that won’t ever come out…
Expand →
By Mike Hudson
Art By Rob Sussman
The little house was close and dark and cluttered. The shades were drawn and the windows shut tight. Outside it was a gorgeous morning in the Hollywood Hills, 74 degrees, the bright sun shining and not a cloud in the sky. But inside, the woman took no notice.
Expand →
By Gil A. Waters
Photo By Dale Johnson
At the time, it seemed like the ideal moment to make my move. It’s not every day I find myself engaged in rapt conversation with a beautiful woman fifteen years younger than myself; her eyes fixed on mine with an intensity suggesting more than a passing interest.
Expand →
By Hank Kirton
Photo By Richard A. Meade
The baby was crying. It wouldn’t stop crying. Alisha, 16, turned up the volume on the television, trying to drown out the sound. She hated the nerve-peeling screech of a crying baby. It was the sound of psychosis. It was the sound of a car collision, of tearing flesh and metal and the shattering of glass and bone.
Expand →
By David Houston
The scarlet letter’s back (unclean) in play.
This process of unthought discovery
presents another willing debauchee.
What – in the bed of a sin – can it weigh?
By Kim Dallesandro
The Westinghouse Building stands in the middle of broken dreams. Six floors high, gutted, engineered, plotted and planned into living spaces where we look outside and watch the despair. My windows face a sweatshop and each day I watch the Hispanic workers lose a little more hope with each garment…
Expand →
By Mike Hudson
Photo By Dale Johnson
Chloe was as ugly as Lola was beautiful, but he loved them both, having found one in arid Bakersfield and the other over near San Bernardino. Lola was an aristocrat while Chloe came from humble mestizo stock and when they weren’t sleeping with him they slept with each other.
Expand →
By dixē.flatlin3
Drawing By Dolorosa De La Cruz
Theresa drove down the street noticing how nondescript and common the main streets of most American towns were. Some touted their Main Street as a source of pride and ingenuity, a throwback to better times, but mostly they were relics of Americana.
Expand →
By C. Roses Lambrecht
Drawing By Lana Gentry
I stopped talking live and in person.
“People won’t know what you want unless you tell them.”
So I’ve been told.
By Craig Woods
Drawing By Dolorosa De La Cruz
MEMO 211:
Pages from a handwritten journal recovered at a suspected site of Muskrat activity in a derelict warehouse district in Glasgow. The site had evidently been vacated in a hurry prior to…
By Danny Baker
Incapacitated skill may be a temporary fracture or simply
speaking its mind without admitting so much in absence
of deep byline clouding the whole story.
By J Karl Bogartte
There is only the moon with vague rumors and the whispering brothel of the last “I love you” ever spoken, the dream that is not a dream, but the corrida of the veil, the “more, deeper, yes!” cast for a parallel series across the harbinger light…
Expand →
By Christopher Nosnibor
Photos By Dale Johnson
So near and yet so far… there was something there, in the mists that eddied around him, just beyond his perception and just out of reach… but try as he might to follow, he simply couldn’t get near to whatever it was, that intangible shadow, that will-o’-the-wisp, that flitted, fleetingly, a fraction of a metre…
Expand →
By Matt Leyshon
Art By Matjames Metson
Photos By Canaan Triplett
“Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy?” bellowed Father after completely turning his backbone upon the joists and fractured rafters.
Expand →
By David Gionfriddo
Photos By Claudia Murari
It was morning now, and time for a wake-up. Sandor opened a vending machine with an old-style iron key and took out a couple of plasticene packets of cherry Vim!.
Expand →
By Robert Earl Reed
Robert Brock sat in the aluminum yard chair and mulled over the wooden skis he had nailed to the legs of the chair. He carved off a piece of white Pepperidge Farm Coconut Cake with a dingy plastic fork trying not to scrape styrofoam from the bottom of the cake box.
Expand →
By Mike Lee
Drawings By Bren Luke
Define this whirlwind: lips touch after that moment at the precipice when verbal and visual relation confront the desire for completion, expressing emotional need and physical desire with a singular act that makes me think eternal.
Expand →
By Matt Hill
Photo By Max Reeves
Upon this rim of looking
Practioneers of the wide shot
Poise themselves for a pullback
By David E. Tolchinsky
In 2001, I was invited to participate in a three-week artists’ residency in New Smyrna Beach, Florida directed by Spalding Gray, who invented the full-length monologue, usually autobiographical, mostly humorous, and delivered while sitting on a bare stage in front of a spare desk.
Expand →
By Jim Coleman
Years ago (must have been in the mid 1980s), I thought I might be able to get away from my problems, my mess of a life, if I went out west. I know, really an original thought. In retrospect, so many things in life seem like clichés.
Expand →
By Gregg Sutton
I just received an email telling me that Mike, who lives in Lunden Hollow, Pa. had received the bass I’d sold and sent him. It arrived in its indestructible pink and black anvil road case. I still remember the day I got that case…
Expand →
By Joe Ambrose
I had no money that particular day. This is not about the extrovert part of life. God knows where the money went. God knows where it came from. It came in fast, often from several directions at once like the American bombs dropping on Baghdad.
Expand →
By Steve Overbury
Photo By Mike Lee
We had a shit hole San Diego motel room and a behemoth of a tail finned Ford, which really only needed a harpoon through its head to be a Great White Whale. We’d sat all day on a sea mist-shrouded Imperial Beach wondering where the sun-kissed girls were…
Expand →
By dixē.flatlin3
Photo By Richard A. Meade
Johnny didn’t like it when they came in his face. Johnny didn’t like them at all, if he were to be honest. They don’t pay him for honesty, though. Exiting the warmth of the vehicles was the worst. Johnny made his way back to the bus stop where he worked.
Expand →
By Claudia Bellocq
Art & Photos By Stefanie Vega
You kept the thing secreted about your person at all times. Its silent beating heart sustained you. It reassured you and in fact, there was some suspicion on my part that it kept you standing upright. Kind of like a sellotape maze of unfathomable significance.
Expand →
By Robert Earl Reed
With the sunrise Robert climbed from the concave spring mattress that was his oil stained nest. Were some unfortunate visitor to drop a match to the bed it would have burned three days on the oil alone. Placing his first foot to the floor wasn’t much of a task.
Expand →
By David Gionfriddo
Photos By Claudia Murari
What was it that sounded so nostalgic, so familiar? As the notes came together in his head, Passmore realized Sandor was dazedly humming a rendition of “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” quite appropriate for the time and place.
Expand →
By Mike Hudson
Photos By Malcolm Alcala
The room cost sixty five a night and had a flat screen TV, a double bed, a little table and three small chairs with worn out blue upholstery. In an old hotel that had gone by many names on that run down section of Western Avenue near Hollywood Boulevard.
Expand →
By Christopher Nosnibor
Art & Photos By Matjames Metson
You wake up with the alarm. You’re still tired. You have no wish to get up. You have to haul yourself out of bed and drag yourself to the bathroom. It’s an ordeal just to lug your carcass to the kitchen to make a coffee. Taking a shit is as close to pleasure as you get.
Expand →
By Rich Follett
Photo By Lisa Wormsley
That thing in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
1984, George Orwell
Expand →
By Robert Seitz
Photo By Dale Johnson
They say that we are already who we need to be. I don’t know, it sounds like destiny and the last thing we want is a human authority on that subject. But I think in terms of appreciation, and even stretching…
Expand →
By Benjamin Robinson
The question arose quite naturally during the course of our preliminary conversation and without my having to prompt Subject. It was established that a vehicle was driven to an all-night store with the purpose of purchasing a set of objects.
Expand →
By D M Mitchell
The great head of the foremost horse crashed through the window showering them with glass. The Assassin whirled his great black leather coat around Mistress C throwing them both to the ground. Huge shards of glass lacerated the crowd of spectators.
Expand →
By Dr. Reginald Paine
Edited By Michael Roth
This work is a home-study book for vivisection written by my great uncle. I discovered it amongst a box of surgical tools in storage at my aunt’s home. The manuscript itself is in very bad condition.
Expand →
By Matt Leyshon
Photo By Russell Allen
Brady awoke to an orange glow melting over his shoulders like grilled Red Leicester. His skin felt brittle like burnt toast. Early indications were that the latest visitation had been brutal.
Expand →
By Douglas J. Ogurek writing as Val Woodson
Painting By Andrew Abbott
Makeup. That’s it. A woman returned her dog to the shelter this morning. She said it was a year old, and “It’s just not compatible with my lifestyle.” It chewed up her furniture. It chewed up her dress. She doesn’t have time for it. The typical spiel. But she did have time to apply gobs of makeup.
Expand →
By Tony Rauch
Painting By Rob Sussman
“Well, it all started one night. I was sitting at my desk in my attic study when a piece of paper at my side began to flutter. Just the corner at first, but then gradually the entire page began to vibrate until it was tapping a slight shimmy.
Expand →
By Tracy Lamont
Images By Patricia Routh
Ket-Jñi — it was Sanskrit or Georgian or something — had always been the most interesting and innovative of the chemusicians. Even in the early days, when songs had been delivered on sugar-cubes, they’d gone the extra mile for their fans, dyeing the sugar…
Expand →
By Gil A. Waters
When the first of my failed marriages finally came to an end, there was one thing I wanted above all else: sex. Not passionate lovemaking infused with deep emotion, but raw fucking that leaves a really big wet spot.
Expand →
By Craig Podmore
Painting By Georganne Deen
She demanded me to puke on her, I was discouraged by her erratic behaviour, almost demonic; her eyes bulged like septic cuts in her forehead, her nose streamed a constant fluid as she beat at her own breasts.
Expand →
By Gene Stewart writing as Everett Bedford
He came hard just as his cock slipped out of her slicked ass, spattering semen all over the insides of her thighs and onto the dark blue satin sheets. She groaned and said, “You wasted it, I wanted it pumped into me,” and began rubbing her clitoris with frantic little motions…
Expand →
By C.F. Roberts
Photo By Michael Dent
Maggie was in heaven…tres heureux, as she would have said in her French Class. Merrill’s enormous dick was swelling in her mouth and she knew she was in the place where she ought to be, between that man’s legs, with that dick in her hungry craw.
Expand →
By Chris Madoch
A great effort needed to be made with what she called her Dalek walking frame over rising and uncertain ground; over short orchard grass, like carpet, fitted right up to the French doors; on a shingle driveway; through longer park grass hiding rabbit runs and mole-hills…
Expand →
By v o l c o f s k Y
Painting By F.X. Tobin
A bodes poorly, he thought. But there was nothing he could do about it. It never failed to stun him – a blow that divided time – how much the contour of her skull, her jawbone, the sealed vaz that was her head – how little that physical object – her skull…
Expand →
By Thomas Kearnes
Hogan tried to concentrate on his task. The checkered blindfold started to slip down his nose. The Hispanic with the thick, uncircumcised penis didn’t slow the rhythm of his hips bopping closer to Hogan’s face. Hogan felt compelled to please men he would never see.
Expand →
By A.D. Hitchin
Drawing By Dolorosa De La Cruz
Heavenly rotating beads originally formed extraterrestrially, nearby a non-vibrating planet. The exogenesis device related to stimulation of the vagina and/or anus. There are outer solar system volatiles which resemble a penis.
Expand →
